Bud Caddell, Director of Technology at Imagination Publishing, consults on marketing, social media, and web development.

I had a newspaper subscription once -- to the Austin American Statesman
-- not because of the editorial or the aesthetic (the Statesman was a running joke
around campus at the time) but because the kid who showed up to sell me
the subscription looked like hell and I felt sorry for him -- $100 worth of sorry.

Day after day, the newspaper came. And day
after day, I read news online. I didn't even bother to peel the paper out of its usually damp plastic wrapper. When neighbors started to complain about the pile of papers outside my door, I started tossing the papers on my
balcony. The pile grew and grew. When company came over, I shoveled the papers into my storage closet. And when I finally moved out, I found my papers had at least been used by someone -- a nest of rats had made a lovely little home for the winter.

I try to keep up with what keyword phrases users are searching for to reach my site, but I also like to keep track of other keyword phrases that I somehow end up ranking for that may not be so apparent ...

Here are all the 'surprising' search terms I currently rank in the top ten for, and the average rank (data may be a little out of date when you read this):

There are quite a few I'm pleasantly shocked by, including "urban social media marketing" and "new thoughts on marketing" -- but what really made me sit up and think was "movable type customer support."

That's right -- I currently out-rank Movable Type's own website when it comes to this search term -- and it's not exactly good for Movable Type since the twoposts are complaints I made against their customer service.

As a marketer, this says two things to me, 1) this is the price of burning a customer on the web, your choices are much louder than before and 2) this is a perfect example of a company in need of online reputation management.

In this post, I'll begin to explore what online reputation management is, using Movable Type as an example.

For Google, we call it the Sandbox -- the effect moving a site over to a new domain or launching a brand new site structure has on the ranking of the site. Plenty of #1 search results plummet after a redesign, never to be heard of again ... I for one think we should call it "Davey Jones' Locker."

When Google returns to your site to have a look over, to kick the tires, to report back what's new and it sees a completely different site altogether -- it gets suspicious. Very suspicious. It moves you from your previous ranking and puts the deep freeze on your site until you prove yourself all over again -- meanwhile, you lose scores of traffic and massive amounts of conversions.

There are ways of speeding your site through the Sandbox -- and returning your site to its proper ranking more quickly. Click through to see my steps and some suggested further reading.

We have titles like Editor, Designer or Developer -- but at our core, we're conversationalists, we're engagement agents, and we seek the most powerful platform to reach and activate your customers. Online communities provide the open dialogue our clients need in order to learn more about their customers and to ultimately serve them better -- sure, not every account fits the online community model, and not every client is ready either ... But I would argue that dialogue is always more valuable, interaction is always preferred, and what you don't know, will most definitely harm you.

I'd like to share a peek into our latest process flow for our online community platforms. I say 'latest' because we're constantly evolving the process with each iteration -- looking for ways to refine our practice, gain some efficiencies and improve the system. But we also want to spell out the work required to our clients, let them know the research that goes in to each project and the risks and rewards that lay ahead.

Sure, there was that time you left a penny for the blind, and the last time you littered, you
shuttered and felt guilty for at least 30 seconds, and occasionally you've thought about helping old ladies cross the street ...

So why is it that everyone thinks you're bad? Why is it that you're blacklisted? Why, oh why, won't your emails get through??!

To help address the problem, Seth, of the brand Seth Godin, has built a lense (yes, a lense, get with the 2.0) to address the problem of good people ending up lumped in with the bad and how to avoid the blacklist.

Blacklists are a real problem -- people sign up for our newsletters, we don't spam, but yet we still end up being blocked by nervous IT admins or over zealous services.

We like to think that when we hit 'send' or 'transmit' that our emails zap through cyberspace like greased lightening, but it's much more akin to the pony express in terms of individual hand-offs. There are many pitfalls along the way, and it's best to get educated on the entire process before you become blacklisted right away.

And it's no easy bake oven -- there's no rotisserie 'set-it-and-forget-it' button -- you have to keep a watchful eye on the blacklists even after you've been removed.

Whew? So why do we put so much time in these things? Seth has an answer for that, too:

Email (sent with permission) has a different function. Its job is to
get a response. To move a conversation forward, to help you learn a
little bit about the person you're engaging with.

If your emails read like direct mail letters or look like brochures, you're wasting time and effort.

Jane Copland, over at SEOmoz, will be heading out of town for nine days, sans computer. For her, and many like her, this is a traumatic experience.

I wanted to provide some relief, some tiny bit of comfort to her for this unfortunate event -- after an exhaustive Google blog search, I could only find tips for dogs. But I'm sure you can adapt these, just replace 'dog' with 'yourself' and 'you' with 'computer.'

Let's try it out!

Here are some commonly recommended ways to treat separation anxiety:

• Place yourself in a smaller space, such as a crate, where you can feel secure when your computer leaves. However, if you panic when
crated, do not force yourself in (always good advice).

• Leave yourself an article of clothing that smells like your
computer, such as an old T-shirt that your computer recently slept in.

• Teach yourself as many commands as possible, especially "sit,"
"relax" and "stay." The point of teaching anxious people to relax is to
give them confidence. Do the exercise in all the rooms of the house and
in the yard. Give praise and treats liberally.

I hope these help if you ever find yourself in shoes similar to Jane's (metaphorically). Just a little levity on Friday the 13th!

Refined Focus: Discover the user
needs related to social networking and explore how a unified social
network service can enhance their experience.

Prototype Goal: Create a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks.

Basically, SocialStream would be the nexus of all of your social networking profiles and platforms, one giant social aggregator, if you will. This was originally kicked-off to help improve Orkut, Google's floundering social app -- and you'll notice that Orkut makes many of the mistakes this study points out.

After blogging about our troubles with customer support and installation, Anil Dash from Six Apart sent me his contact info and assured me they would remedy the situation. Well, that didn't happen. Anil never responded.

Over at the Google WebmasterCentral blog, Adam Lasnik outlined 'the best uses of flash' in terms of how Googlebot reads and dissects content on the page.

Google can rip out the text of a flash file, but it's content without context.

"As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and
Googlebot doesn't have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files
and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context
are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash
as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn't currently have the algorithmic
eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be
missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is
in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse,
while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet
spiders can."

Flash is not only a visual medium, it's a presentation medium. Information is pushed at the user -- but we know from experience that most users muddle through sites. Even after we analyze keyword phrases, user analytics and usability, our best navigation often takes one or two visits before it 'makes sense' to the user. Until then, their navigation of the site takes a seemingly random approach.

Flash only sites often fail miserably in presenting content in a way that doesn't frustrate or befuddle users. Flash is great for moving graphics or interactive games -- but terrible for textual content.

SEO is a good reason to avoid flash-only sites, but the better reason is user experience. Design houses often ask 'what's the budget?' before they really consider 'what's the objective?'